What happens to student activism once mass protests have disappeared from view, and youth no longer embody the political frustrations and hopes of a nation? After the Revolution chronicles the lives of student activists as they confront the possibilities and disappointments of democracy in the shadow of the recent revolution in Serbia. Greenberg's narrative highlights the stories of young student activists as they seek to define their role and articulate a new form of legitimate political activity, post-socialism. When student activists in Serbia helped topple dictator Slobodan Milosevic on October 5, 2000, they unexpectedly found that the post-revolutionary period brought even greater problems. How do you actually live and practice democracy in the wake of war and the shadow of a recent revolution? How do young Serbians attempt to translate the energy and excitement generated by wide scale mobilization into the slow work of building democratic institutions? Greenberg navigates through the ranks of student organizations as they transition their activism from the streets back into the halls of the university. In exploring the everyday practices of student activists-their triumphs and frustrations-After the Revolution argues that disappointment is not a failure of democracy but a fundamental feature of how people live and practice it. This fascinating book develops a critical vocabulary for the social life of disappointment with the aim of helping citizens, scholars, and policymakers worldwide escape the trap of framing new democracies as doomed to failure.
"At a time when manifestos on the politics of hope abound, it is precisely through such historicization that Greenberg's book constitutes an important intervention beyond the study of Serbia, too . . . Greenberg's sophisticated book offers ethnographically informed food for thought on the politics of disappointment, and therefore of hope, today. This is political anthropology at its best."
Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute
"After the Revolution is an excellent, articulate book that presents a detailed and lively historical and ethnographic analysis of the forms of political engagement that followed the Serbian revolution . . . [I]ts trenchant, illuminating analysis of the everyday semiotic categories of time, space, and praxis underlying revolutionary and postrevolutionary politics will also have broad and lasting r
Slavic Review
"In this fascinating and important new book, Jessica Greenberg makes a significant contribution to the anthropology of politics. Focusing on the dilemmas faced by political activists in the aftermath of revolutionary change, she deftly weaves together issues of temporality, youth, affect, and democracy. After the Revolution will be of great interest to scholars in multiple fields of study."
